Perhaps a better question is, What do you get when you place a restaurant’s carbon footprint at the forefront of every decision made along the way? Karen Leibowitz, the restaurant’s co-founder and Director of Communications, explains this process.

This isn’t your first restaurant. You and your husband, Anthony Myint, started Mission Street Food (which became Mission Chinese Food) and Commonwealth, among other projects. How did this one come about?

In 2013 we were approached by the Avalon Group to start a restaurant on the ground floor of their apartments on 9th Street. At the time, we’d been thinking about ways to make our existing restaurants more sustainable, so we wondered what we would do if we started from the beginning with the environment in mind. We said we’d only agree to look into this opportunity if we could go all the way with respect to the environment. And they said, great!

The Perennial’s website includes a great deal of information about the choices you’ve made. How do you communicate your greater mission to guests once they’ve walked through the door?

We ask our servers to meet diners at their level of interest. They’re trained to answer questions about what we’re doing, but not to speechify. Our dinner menu says:

The Perennial is a restaurant and bar dedicated to environmental sustainability. We believe that food must be part of the climate change conversation, and that restaurants can lead the way. We’re trying to re-think everything about the food world and we’re happy to tell you about it. (Or you can just enjoy the food.)

COVERS

In 2003, Chef Marco Canora, fresh from the helm of Tom Colicchio’s Craft, opened a restaurant of his own — Hearth — a lovely, intimate East Village spot with an Italian sensibility and a Greenmarket-driven menu. The restaurant drew rave reviews and a loyal clientele.

Time passed. Canora got married, had two kids, and started taking better care of himself, paying serious attention to his own health and nutrition. He even wrote a book about it—A Good Food Day. He began drinking nutrient-dense Brodo, or bone broth. He was so impressed with its healing powers— it is known to relieve arthritis, fight infections, build strong bones, support the liver in detoxing the body, and reduce inflammation overall — that he opened Brodo, a streetside retail window at Hearth, and wrote a book about that, too.

With a new commitment to health and wellness, and a bustling side business selling bone broth, you’d think Canora might be ready to sit back and relax. Alas, no. Twelve years from the launch of Hearth, Canora was itching for change. The restaurant felt stale; the menu, overwrought. His commitment to farm-to-table ingredients, not strong enough. He had new ideas and wanted a stage to make them happen. Rather than close Hearth and start from scratch, he decided to revive the concept, closing down for a week, and relaunching anew.

Hearth re-opened on January 8th with a fresh new interior, reimagined hand-drawn graphics by artist Libby VanderPloeg, and a new menu without apps and entrées, but filled with small- and medium-sized plates in categories such as fish, vegetables, meat, broth, grains, and offal. The result is a restaurant that’s new, yet familiar, and one that has been given a fresh start with a reinvigorated staff and a clientele eager to explore the unchartered landscape. It’s an operator’s dream.

Andrea Strong chatted with Canora about the art of reinvention, and the struggle to “put asses in the seats.”

On the Internet, everyone’s a potential restaurant critic. There’s no shortage of sites and apps that let guests rate, review, recommend, or otherwise critique your experience anywhere. (Some even give them points for it.) While the average consumer probably doesn’t judge within the same criteria or reach as, say, the New York Times, first-person reviews and recommendations are read and used by other potential customers.

In fact, even the most “traditional” of restaurant reviews aren’t immune to the internet’s influence. Just last week, Thomas Keller responded, via his website, to New York Times restaurant critic Pete Wells’s two-star review of Per Se in New York — something the public seemed to be waiting for. While not every review is as high profile as 1,500 words in the country’s most respected journal of record, the sheer fact that Thomas Keller could respond publicly had us waiting with bated breath.

Online reviews have been around for a while, but the popularity of social media makes reviews and recommendations instant. With a seemingly infinite number of ways to communicate online, there are a whole lot of places, beyond the usual suspects, where reviews of your restaurant might be hiding. Here, how to find them, and tips on responding.